Moving your list from Substack

Substack lets you download your subscriber list as a CSV, and that file imports here directly. Issue Mint reads the address column and, if the file has one, a first name column. Nothing else in the file is used.

The move itself takes a few minutes. What takes longer to decide is what to do with your Substack archive, and the answer for most people is to leave it up.

Where the export lives

Substack’s subscriber export lives in your publication’s settings, in the area that deals with imports, exports and your data, rather than on the subscriber list itself.

Substack prepares the file and offers it as a download, sometimes after a short wait on a large list. If you have run several publications from one account, check you are in the settings of the publication you actually mean before you export, because the files look identical once they are sitting in a downloads folder.

Which columns matter

The address column is the one that matters, and on a Substack export it is normally the first one.

Alongside it you will usually find the date each reader signed up, one or more columns describing whether they are on a paid plan and when it runs out, and a flag for readers who have turned email off. Issue Mint reads none of those, so if you want to leave anybody behind, delete their rows in a spreadsheet before you upload, or export a narrower selection.

The readers worth deleting are the ones who have turned email off. They are still counted as subscribers by Substack and they will import perfectly well here, and then they either ignore your issues or report them, neither of which does you any good.

What to map on the mapping screen

Point the email field at the address column, and leave the first name field set to not importing names unless your file genuinely has names in it.

Issue Mint pre-selects both from the header row, so on a normal Substack export you are confirming its guess rather than making one. The screen also asks you to tick that these people gave you permission to email them, and to write a sentence saying where the list came from. Importing a CSV covers the file requirements, including the limit of 20 MB and what to do about a spreadsheet program that insists on saving in the wrong encoding.

What the counts mean afterwards

Issue Mint emails you when the import finishes, and that email carries three numbers.

Imported is what landed. Skipped is addresses already on your list, duplicates inside the file, and anything suppressed by an earlier hard bounce or complaint. Invalid is rows that are not addresses, plus addresses whose domain can no longer receive mail at all. The refused ones are named on your subscribers page and kept there for 180 days, so you can see exactly which they were. On a list that has been mailed weekly the invalid count is usually small, because Substack has been dropping dead addresses on your behalf for as long as you have been publishing.

Paid subscribers, and what happens to them

Paid Substack subscribers import as ordinary readers, because Issue Mint has no paid subscriptions and no plans to add them.

Everybody on the list gets every issue. If you were making real money from paid subscriptions, that is a reason to think hard before moving, and it is set out plainly in the Issue Mint and Substack comparison along with the things that work better here. Newsletters that earn from sponsorship rather than subscriptions are the ones this product is built for.

What to do with your Substack archive

Leave it online. Your old posts are earning search traffic and carrying links from other sites, and deleting them throws that away for nothing.

Issue Mint gives you a new archive website that starts with your next issue and builds from there, on your own domain if you have one. Point readers at it from a final Substack post, keep the old archive where it is, and let the new one accumulate. There is more on how a new archive gets indexed in search engines and your website.